


don't mind

by atsueshi



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 14:06:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4790063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atsueshi/pseuds/atsueshi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tsukishima finds that he doesn't mind being friends with Hinata at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	don't mind

Every so often, Tsukishima meets someone of incomparable stupidity. In most instances, he usually thinks – and eventually opts – to discard such a person, and after Yamaguchi, he didn’t think he’d have vacancies for more friends anyway.

 _Extra baggage_ , he thinks, _unnecessarily troublesome and truly pointless, even for entertainment purposes_.

Enter Hinata Shouyou, sunshine incarnate, bringer of joy and representation of all that is good and bright in the world. Pure and irrepressible, passionate and extreme, clumsy to a fault and more often dumb than not.

He scoffs at their first meeting, after the initial irritation fades and the emotions slowly die down – it was not funny being jumped at like that, feeling a rush of wind above his head, his towering six feet, something he never thought was possible – and Tsukishima disposes of the memory as but another one of those odd moments where life tries to get a rise out of him. He tells Yamaguchi, on the way home, that that shrimp and the king weren’t the sort of people he’d be interested in being team mates with. “Good thing the captain doesn’t mind us not being friends,” Yamaguchi says afterwards. Tsukishima agrees, and is secretly thankful for the allowance. He thinks that while friendship with Kageyama was a far-removed possibility, friendship with Hinata was downright impossible.

But then actually _meets_ Hinata, during training camp and the few moments when they’d share the courtside during practice, and it turns out that he finds some merits actually worth _something_ in the guy, and it may have been enough for him to decide to let this—enemy? Friend? Acquaintance? Team mate—stay around for a while.

And stay for a while Hinata does. Longer, actually, than Tsukishima would have thought was allowable in a universe where he could harness all the powers of one’s mental faculties in making such a simple decision. _Fuck it_ , Tsukishima tells himself anyway, throwing caution to the wind and letting Hinata shake his hand after a mini-game, watching as the orange ball of energy shakes his hand in front of the rest of Karasuno (“Tsukishima let me shake his hand! Tsukishima _shook my hand,_ Kageyama, look!”). Tsukishima, for all his many qualms in life, was fundamentally a pragmatist, so he thinks, _I_ _might as well for all the time I’ve spent curating this person’s stupidity._ And then, the “fuck it” turns (arguably) into “well it seems this person’s okay” and eventually (far, far into the future of their friendship, hopefully) “I actually think this person is pretty capable, maybe just a little misguided and way too lazy to start thinking properly”.

* * *

(Late in their third year, Tsukishima will find those thoughts tapering off to a nice “hey this one can stay for as long as it wants, I don’t care, I don’t mind anymore” that will lead to so many scenarios that don’t always go the way Tsukishima wants, but he will also find that it’s all quite bearable, why not, it’s just a small thing.)

* * *

There are so many things he’s yet to learn about Hinata; one year is hardly enough to make him acknowledge a person. (Yamaguchi, since the inception of their friendship, always broke Tsukishima’s rules, so he doesn’t count). For instance, he still doesn’t know why Hinata insists on yapping incessantly despite his obvious disinterest, or why Hinata sticks to Kageyama so much even though they do nothing but argue when they’re not busy talking volleyball. What Tsukishima _does_ know, however, is that his _friend_ —stupid and flawed to a point, a walking, talking bundle of psychological and emotional dung-drops—often makes attempts at being less of a burden, only these attempts are so futile and, predictably, rather silly.

* * *

(Six months into their first year of high school and, consequently, their _friendship_ , he tried to throw a dinosaur-themed birthday party for Tsukishima, but he ended up choosing Godzilla items. While it was admittedly better, because Tsukishima _had_ been slightly afraid Hinata would fail at it and he’d end up meeting that obnoxious purple-and-green excuse of a dinosaur, it was still a few ways away from actual dinosaurs. The intentions there were pure and unmistakable, but the execution and the planning were as existent as Hinata’s awareness of the fact that _planning_ always goes before _execution._ )

* * *

For the most part, Tsukishima knows—and even appreciates, maybe, if he wants to be completely honest with himself, which no, he doesn’t _want,_ not when it comes to that Hinata—that Hinata tries to accommodate him as a friend. It shows in the way he slowly learns to shut up when Tsukishima feels like being quiet, and in the way he snaps at Tsukishima sometimes, when Tsukishima is being particularly taunting. The rest of it is just a gleeful roller coaster of never-ending loop-the-loops that alternate between moments of brilliance and moments of skull-numbing and logic-defying exasperation. Tsukishima sometimes feels confused, though, his thoughts retroacting to the day that he’d decided to call Hinata a team mate and a _friend_ , and when he airs this concern with Yamaguchi one day, what Yamaguchi finds most amazing—and this Tsukishima didn’t even expect—is that he still lets Hinata stay anyway.

“By now, you’d have closed off, but you haven’t even tried yet,” Yamaguchi says to him, a knowing smile lingering in the corners of his mouth and his eyes. “I thought you said he was extra baggage?”

 _Not really extra baggage,_ Tsukishima thinks as he grunts in reply to Yamaguchi’s rhetorical question, because Yamaguchi knows it already (he always does). _He’s the kind of troublesome that somehow matters, pointless but that’s the point, and at the very least he is a source of entertainment._

That doesn’t really make a difference, though. Late into the nights when he’d let his thoughts wander, he asks himself the same question (“Why let him stay?”) and he arrives at a very simple answer each time: _Hinata is pretty stupid and bothersome, sure, but I can actually cope with it. All will be well and good._

* * *

(One day Hinata decides to drag Tsukishima along, to practice spiking with a blocker. They end up staying way past school hours and the dean drops by with his usual smug face, and the next day they receive an earful from Daichi-san. Hinata humbly takes the blame, and Tsukishima keeps quiet all throughout the ordeal, but he sighs the rest of the day and finds it incredibly annoying that Hinata hounds him and apologises _every single chance he gets._ Yamaguchi giggles and reprimands Hinata half-heartedly during the eighth time it happens, but mostly Tsukishima blames it all on the one particular idiot who was – and is, and will probably forever be – dumb enough to let Hinata stay, for as long as he wants, _I don’t care, I don’t mind anymore_.)

**Author's Note:**

> Yamaguchi, in his spare time, finds that Tsukishima's bafflement at his friendship with Hinata, though uncharacteristic of him, isn't completely unfounded either.
> 
> (Just then, it hits him: he really, really likes Hinata too.)


End file.
